Wide area networks provide people and organizations with access to a variety of applications and services. For example, with the proliferation of wireless communication networks, such as mobile telephone networks, access to mobile communication applications and services has become widely available.
As mobile telephone networks have advanced, more applications and services have been made available over the mobile telephone networks, including applications and services that are increasingly bandwidth intensive. This has led to increased concern over the constrained bandwidth resources of mobile telephone networks. Of particular concern are “usage spikes”—periods of time during which there are significant increases in network traffic. Usage spikes, which may be localized or network-wide, may have a variety of causes, including, for example, a large event (e.g., a sporting event) or a nationwide television broadcast that leads to a spike in network traffic. Usage spikes can be debilitating to a mobile telephone network or other wide area network. In some situations, for example, a usage spike may unintentionally block or otherwise impede or delay communications over the network. Unfortunately, a conventional end-user device (e.g., a mobile phone) used to access a wide area network typically reacts autonomously to blocked, impeded, or delayed network communications with trial and error based network usage requests that increase the demand for network bandwidth and exacerbate the problems caused by a usage spike.